Israel’s choice: Oslo or Netanyahu’s apartheid state?

Today’s Israel is coming to resemble yesterday’s South Africa. Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Palestinians has reduced Gaza to rubble. Tens of thousands, the great majority women and children, have been killed. The expansion of Jewish settlements and violent attacks on the local population are creating a series of Palestinian Bantustans in the West Bank. The read-across to apartheid South Africa is not exact. But close enough.

It is not that long ago that Israel liked to think of itself as European-style democracy. Given the expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, the claim has seemed shaky for some time. But Israel was largely successful in presenting itself as an island of liberalism stranded in a sea of Arab autocracies. Such pretensions have been abandoned. Internationally, it is now working hard to achieve pariah status.

UN-backed experts have concluded that the conduct of the war has created a famine in Gaza city. Around a quarter of the rest of the population is classified as “starving” The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Britain has sanctioned senior members of his cabinet. Germany, long Israel’s most steadfast ally, has halted sales of weapons that could be used in Gaza. Next month Britain, France, Canada and Australia plan to add their names to those of the majority of United Nations members that have formally recognised Palestinian statehood.

The response from Netanyahu? Insouciant disregard for internationally recognised norms and laws. The UN agency responsible for refugees is accused to being in league with Hamas terrorists. Wherever he looks Netanyahu sees a great conspiracy, a plot rooted in anti-semitism. Israel will do as it pleases – at least unless its great protector Donald Trump decides enough Palestinian blood is enough.

The world, or most of it, still sees a two-state solution as the only route to a permanent settlement – Israel and Palestine living alongside each other in peace and security as envisaged by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. Every move by Netanyahu’s government seems calculated to render such an outcome impossible.

It has always been a struggle to separate the personal from the political with Netanyahu. Since the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 his overriding objective has been to evade responsibility for the security failures that allowed the attack. The premiership is a bulwark also against the corruption charges he faces in the Israeli courts. The war in Gaza is central to the strategy. His promised elimination of Hamas is an impossible goal. But that is the point. As long as the fighting continues, Netanyahu thinks he can avoid the political reckoning.

In this calculation, the fate of the remaining 50 Israeli hostages (perhaps 20 still alive) is a second order issue – a small sacrifice in the effort to prop up his premiership. And bombing and shelling Palestinian civilians while starving the population serves hardens the support of his extreme right coalition partners.

The Israel Defence Force, which now more closely resembles a lawless militia than a regular army, is preparing an assault on the heart of Gaza city that serves no credible purpose beyond razing it to the ground. According to the UN, military zones or areas under IDF evacuation orders now comprise some 85 per cent of the territory in Gaza.

The objective, it seems, is to make it inhabitable for Palestinians save in tented cities under the guns of the Israeli military. The government’s latest plan to split the West Bank in two by building a large new settlement close to Jerusalem is part of the same picture. Netanyahu’s coalition partners are unabashed in their declarations that the purpose is to “bury” what remains of the two-state idea.

In this ew Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, living in fenced off “homelands” guarded by the IDF, like the blacks and coloureds of apartheid South Africa will be debarred from civil and political rights.

Israeli democracy will not survive such a system. But in his casual disregard for the rule of law and attempts to neutralise Israel’s judiciary, Netanyahu has already shown he is not fussed by such niceties. He counts himself alongside Vladimir Putin as one of the world’s “strong men” And on this score at least Trump can scarcely complain.

There are many, outside as well as inside Israel, who argue that even before the Hamas attacks, the facts on the ground created by successive governments in an increasingly illiberal nation, had rendered the Oslo blueprint inoperable. They have a point. Until that is you look at the alternatives. A pluralist democracy offering Palestinians equal rights in a single state looks even more unlikely. And do Israelis really want to take the road to South Africa’s apartheid past?